Monetization Review (One Year Later) — Octane360 Domain
An update to my review of geo domain monetization solution.
It’s been over a year since I provided early results from monetizing domain names on Octane360.
I titled my review “Octane360 Takes Domain Monetization Beyond PPC“.
Although I’m still happy with my results on Octane360, a lot of things have changed since my original review — counting the “beyond PPC”. As it turns out, over half of my revenue on the system is coming from PPC now.
The big change came when Local.com purchased the firm for up to $11 million. Based on milestone payments the firm has received since then (as detailed in Local.com’s recent annual note), Octane360 seems to be firing on all cylinders.
As a refresher, the service monetizes geo domain names such as CincinnatiPainters.com and LittlerockSiding.com. It creates a site for each domain that has multiple monetization methods: paid monthly listings, lead forms, and pay-per-click.
Local.com has a very strong PPC feed for local traffic and this has given a big boost to Octane360’s revenue stream. PPC from this feed now generates more than half of my revenue with the service.
I have just over 250 domains on the system. At any given time there are regarding 20-25 sold listings on the sites. Since of the sales commissions paid on these listings you make regarding $5 per listing per month. This is nothing to sneeze at — a listing sold for two months pays your entire registration fee for a year. If someone buys a listing directly on a site you get a much larger fee. I’ve found the churn on listings to be higher than I hoped, though.
Some of the domain names in my portfolio are hard to sell listings against (e.g. “prefab” domains), so I suspect other people are getting a higher listing-to-site sales ratio.
On the downside, Octane360 domain names aren’t doing so well in search. In my original review I noted that 90% of them were on the first page of Google for the exact match term. I even sold a couple of the sites to local business owners partly since of those good rankings.
But Google isn’t smiling upon the sites anymore. Now only a handful appear on the first page of Google.
That’s not necessarily a problem. My top 10 sites last month totaled regarding $100 in revenue with a median RPM of $1,166 thanks to listing revenue. Overall my RPM over the past month is $27, with $10.64 contributed from listings and $16.46 from PPC.
On standard parked pages I’d probably earn regarding a $10 RPM on these domains and get less traffic thanks to no search visitors.
In a nutshell, Octane360 is still a winner…even if it’s winning in a different way than I first imagined.
